


Knitting Projects of Doom

by Drag0nst0rm



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Breaking out of Mandos, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Humor, Second Age, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 19:44:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18079754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/pseuds/Drag0nst0rm
Summary: Celebrimbor had known he might be seeing his grandfather again soon.He'd just thought it would be in the Halls of Mandos, not his workshop.





	Knitting Projects of Doom

**Author's Note:**

> Another possibility of what might happen if Feanor keeps messing with time travel. A considerably more cheerful possibility.
> 
> Goldenshadowofthesun wanted Feanor and Celebrimbor, Time Travel, and a tea cozy of doom.
> 
> I feel like the Tea Cozy of Doom probably deserves some explanation, so here it is for anyone who cares:
> 
> Last year a friend and I were talking about fate, and about the imagery usually associated with it, like the cut thread. We’re both fans of the Silmarillion, so Vaire’s tapestries, although not strictly fate, also came up.
> 
> At which point, we mutually decided that these dignified images were all well and good, but what if a seer decided that the thing to do was to put her prophecies on really ridiculous knobby hats? Nice thick scarves? Tea-cozies? Things that no dignified adventurer, heroic or villainous, would want to cart around but would have to because it’s the only copy of the prophecy they have?
> 
> My friend knit me a beautiful square depicting a tea cup and the words “Tea Cozy of DOOM.” I ended up writing a very bad poem about it.
> 
> And so now between the two of us, all objects of power that come in ridiculous packages are tea cozies of doom.
> 
> And now Feanor has one.

Celebrimbor had accepted that he was about to die.

He’d held out some small bit of hope that they might fight off Sauron’s forces at least until reinforcements came, but that hope had fallen with the gates.

Cornered in his own workshop with only a table between him and his one-time friend, there was no hiding the truth. He was going to die. His fast fading hope was that he would die quickly.

Judging by Annat-Sauron’s cruel smile, he doubted it.

He gritted his teeth and raised his sword in useless challenge -

And the world -

Tore -

Stretched - 

It settled, and he couldn’t stop himself from falling on his knees, gagging helplessly. So this was how he would fall. His father would be so proud.

Only, when he looked up, Sauron was grasping the doorframe, looking quite as ill as Celebrimbor felt.

And there was someone else in the room. 

Sauron’s eyes widened. “You.” His gaze swung to Celebrimbor. “This is what your rings do?”

“You’re the one they called a necromancer,” he said as he forced himself back onto his feet and a few wary steps away. It was almost like old times when they’d bickered over who’d been responsible for the failure of a project.

Except none of their other projects had ever called up the dead before.

Or his hadn’t, anyway.

Although he had to admit that while he could easily see Sauron calling up his grandfather to unsettle or taunt him, he wouldn’t have expected him to call up his grandfather looking like … this.

Namely, holding the most ridiculous looking hat Celebrimbor had ever seen. The colors were eye searing, there was a little bobble on it like Mannish children sometimes wore, and there was a long slit on either side that’s purpose was frankly baffling. The elegant elvish script along the brim only made things worse.

Grandfather was beginning to look annoyed. “I called myself up, thank you, though admittedly this was not the time I was aiming for.” He frowned down at the … object … in his hands and turned it slightly. “Ah, I see. I shouldn’t have rushed so, Namo or no Namo. No matter; now is when I’ve been woven back into time, and so now is when I shall do my best to reweave things.”

Celebrimbor took a few moments to process this. “You broke out of the Halls of Mandos with time travel?”

Grandfather looked pleased that he’d grasped this so quickly. “Exactly.”

“So there’s another of you,” Sauron said slowly. “Still in the Halls.”

“Presumably.” Grandfather looked thoughtful. He was picking at the hat-thing now, presumably making some adjustment to whatever had gone wrong, and pacing idly as he did. Celebrimbor had fond memories of watching his grandfather doing that in his workshop back in Tirion. “I wonder what would happen if we met.”

Celebrimbor was also rather curious. Sauron did not look at all curious, and Celebrimbor was forced to admit, very reluctantly, that just this once Sauron might be showing the best sense of the lot of them.

“And the key,” Sauron continued in his silken, sneering voice, “was that ridiculous thing?”

Grandfather grimaced. “Unfortunately, I had rather limited materials to work with and this shape was the stablest I could contrive, crude as it is.” 

Sauron’s eyes glowed with new avarice.

Celebrimbor suddenly wished he had a ring to distract him with. Surely even him getting his hands on one of those would be better than this.

“You want it, I presume,” Grandfather said almost idly.

Celebrimbor wanted to scream. His grandfather had stopped at the point of his pacing closest to Sauron. He was surely within reach. Where was the fire that had so consumed him? Where was his fight? Why did he just stand there?

“And you, I suppose, want to make a trade,” Sauron said silkily. “Your … grandson, disclaimed you though he has, for this device.”

Grandfather looked around the workroom. Namely, at the Feanorian stars that Celebrimbor had, perhaps, had a bit too much defiant pride in putting up everywhere.

“That’s what Curufin says,” he said dryly. “Going by the evidence, I’m beginning to think he was being a bit dramatic, but that’s neither here nor there.”

He moved even as he spoke. He made to slam the absurd hat down on Sauron’s head. Sauron’s eyes widened, and he thrust his hand up to stop it, but Grandfather only shoved the hat down on that instead.

For one moment, the workshop was frozen in that ridiculous tableaux.

Then Grandfather sprang back, and Sauron - and the hat - were gone.

Even for Celebrimbor’s quick mind, that was a bit much. 

“What did you just do?”

Grandfather looked very, very pleased with himself. “Trapped him in a time paradox. It should have fallen on me for doing this, but by taking possession of the device, it passed to him.” He hesitated. “I think. Properly speaking this is just a prototype, you have to understand, but if it was going to have catastrophic effects on history we would have noticed already, so all we really have to worry about is him figuring out how the thing works and coming back. At the very least, he’s gone for now.”

“The orcs are not,” Celebrimbor said somewhat shakily as the shock of what had just happened really set in.

Grandfather dismissed this with a wave. “Orcs we can handle.”

Celebrimbor was less sure, but then, he was still rather stuck on - “You defeated him with a hat. A bad hat.”

Grandfather looked a little offended. “A tea cozy, actually. They’re an invention of Man’s Finrod apparently told Fingon about, and they came up in conversation - “

“How?”

Grandfather ignored this. “ - and the idea of the two openings seemed symbolically interesting, as it provides both an entrance and an exit into the tapestry of time. Caranthir could have made it more aesthetically pleasing, no doubt, but he had to teach me through Fingon carrying messages, and your cousin was strangely reluctant.”

Celebrimbor couldn’t imagine why.

“The next one will be better.”

“The next one?” Celebrimbor asked. He finally tore his eyes away from the door where Sauron had so lately been standing.

“The rest of the family remains trapped,” Grandfather reminded him. “We need to fix that one way or another.” He hesitated again. Twice in one conversation. Practically unprecedented. “I suppose I presume a bit when I say we.”

Celebrimbor was not at all sure what the right thing to do in this situation was, and even if he’d thought he had, he’d recently gotten confirmation that his judgement was terrible.

There were so many ways this could go wrong. Possibly even more wrong than the rings.

The distant clamor of the orcs was getting closer.

But Grandfather didn’t rush him. Just waited, looking at him expectantly.

“Alright,” he said in a gust of breath. At least this was an excitingly new and different mistake than the last one. “Alright. How are we getting out of here?”

Grandfather pulled out a second hat.

If Celebrimbor found out there was a third one of those somewhere, he was going to either laugh or cry, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out which.


End file.
